Dear LPG,

Looking around the internet recently, I found a list of animals who are thought to spend large amounts of their lives alone, and while the list includes some animals which I was surprised to find there, one of the species not included on the list was human beings.   It got me thinking that most of us homo sapiens prefer other people’s company to too much of our own, although I also found some evidence that there are more men than women that find themselves learning to tolerate such an existence.

I suspect that it is more a case of not having the opportunity to share your thoughts rather than a choice for most of the people caught up in this way, and the fallout is that often we find ourselves exercising too much of our brain power to overthinking; especially during those parts of a lockdown day when there is nothing interesting on the television and no one to phone.

We have had a lot of time to think about things during the past year.  So many of us have been forced into a situation where the only person we have around us is ourselves and, although some learn to cope and adjust, those people who have been forced to live alone because of circumstance often find that it is not an ideal way to live. 

I think many of us get bogged down in thinking too much when we have all that time for analysis and there has been much too much time for that lately.  We are a naturally sociable species and overthinking is often the result of having too much time with no one else to share your thoughts with.  I have come to the conclusion that overthinking is the result of not having another point of view to compare yours with.

Learning to overthink can leave you worrying about all sorts of decisions that you would normally make without a second thought and, according to some of my findings, all the extra thinking time that Covid-19 has afforded us may well have a bearing on our perception of life when we are allowed to interact again. 

This got me wondering just how you know if you are overthinking your way through life at the moment, and what you can do about it, and I found some interesting theories on the internet. 

To keep them to myself would be selfish, so I have asked LPG to link you to a few internet ideas that might broaden your thoughts on the subject if there is no one around to share a conversation with.

It was Greta Garbo who was famous for saying, ‘I want to be alone’, but most of us don’t…

GW, Crofton Park.

GW shares the websites that inspired her message today…

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… a quiz or two to help you work out your personal standing as an over-thinker…

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… and a few online solutions…

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